How Leftists Need to Think About Voting This November
slate.com
The lessons of history are vital for 2024.

Leftists who don’t like Biden don’t want to see him in office again, so they don’t want to vote for him, or they want to withhold their vote until he changes course. Seems simple enough.

But that’s not how politics works.

So announcing that you'll vote for him no matter what he does will make him change course? Is that how politics works?

Never, in the history of this country, has there been a president who hasn’t engaged in what the left would regard as unforgivable crimes. This is the nature of presidents, and politicians in general. If you, like me, are on the far left, you should never fully trust or have faith in any elected official.

But when I look at the Biden administration, I see a group of people who can be bullied in a leftist direction on some policy priorities.

lenin-laugh

Can anyone today truly argue that the world wasn’t drastically changed by Gore’s loss in 2000? Even if you don’t accept the argument that Nader’s candidacy is what lost Gore the election, how can you argue that the world wouldn’t have been at least a little better if all of those Nader votes had gone to Gore and put the Dems over the top?

Democrats have held the presidency 50% of the time since 2000.

  • PKMKII [none/use name]
    ·
    1 month ago

    The answer, of course, is that Trump becomes president again. And Project 2025 flies into effect. And the country goes mask-off fascist. And trans people like me become illegal by our very existence. And Israel “finishes the job” in Gaza with vocal cheering from the White House. And Trump has his enemies imprisoned or worse with impunity. And the world teeters on the brink. And so on.

    Biden is doing nothing to stop Israel from finishing the job; once again, libs care more about the branding of the genocide than the genocide itself. For the other “points”: if Trump didn’t do all those things when he had a Republican majority in Congress during his first term, why would he do it in his second term when he has even less reason to throw a bone at the religious conservatives he clearly thinks are rubes?

    Infamously, in the fateful early years of the 1930s, the German Communists viciously opposed the governing center-left Social Democratic Party. Calling the centrists “Social Fascists,” they declared that there was no substantive difference between liberalism and Nazism. They refused to ally themselves with the center.

    And if they had, how would that have changed anything? It’s not like the centrists would suddenly have a change of heart about Communism and decide that they didn’t need Hitler to keep the left in check.

    Instead of echoing the hardline leftists of 1931, the American left should look to their counterparts in France of 2024. The world has breathed a sigh of relief over the shocking upset against Marine Le Pen’s far-right party in the recent legislative elections there. The key to that victory was a last-minute alliance of the centrist liberals and the radical left. It worked.

    The key difference being that France has actual left wing parties with the structure to force the sort of strategic round-two dropouts needed to thwart the National Rally. There are no such parties in America that can do that; the Greens, DSA, PSL, they’re all too small and too hampered by the two party system to make that effect. The Squad is not analogous to the Popular Front. Bullying works because the bully holds power over the bullied. There is no meaningful way for small leftist organizations, let alone leftists as an unstructured mass, to do that in America.